I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language.
ALAN FURSTThe best Paris I know now is in my head.
More Alan Furst Quotes
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I’m a genre writer.
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Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.
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I don’t just want my books to be about the ’30s and ’40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as ’40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.
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One is what one has the nerve to pretend to be.
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Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower – translated from a French saying
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the fact that they existed was uncommonly interesting, but no sane person would actually believe what they said
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And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.
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You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.
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The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency.
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I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.
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I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
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I read very little contemporary anything.
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I expect them to have read books – there are a lot of people like that! That’s my audience.
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My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else’s books.
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I’m not really a mass market writer.
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Good people want to spend their time mowing the lawn and playing with the dog. But bad people spend all their time being bad. It is all they think about.
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Showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.
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I invented the historical spy novel.
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I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers.
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Once you have your characters, they tell you what to write, you don’t tell them.
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If you’re a writer, you’re always working.
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I don’t inflict horrors on readers.
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When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I’m gonna do 320, that’s 160 days.
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Good people don’t spend their time being good.
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I have a very serious censorship office inside my head; it censors things that I could tell you that you would never forget, and I don’t want to be the person to stick that in your brain.
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Live today, for tomorrow we die.
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